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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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What sensitive data does Twitter hold? Genuinely curious
We don't know what was on those servers, but it was apparently sensitive enough that the government redacted descriptions of the data in court filings.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/us-government-slams-musk-in-court-filing-describing-chaotic-environment-at-x/
Isn’t all of it encrypted though? Like I understand physical access to servers is generally bad, but you’d think once the the things are unplugged it would be difficult to access the data again without bypassing encryption. I’m not a software engineer though
I'm a security engineer, and encryption is great, but can be bypassed. Relying on encryption assumes it was implemented properly, that the system was shut down properly so all keys were flushed correctly, and the encryption algorithm doesn't have weaknesses.
Generally if somebody dedicated enough can acquire physical access to a system, they can probably find a way into it given the right resources. Did that happen here? Probably not. Could it have? Absolutely. That's why most enterprises or government hard drives are shredded rather than just relying on them being wiped or encrypted.
Encryption is part of the solution, but it's not automatically the complete solution.
Probably because the government is still illegally spying on citizens and they don't want the specifics to leak out.
You don't consider credit card info sensitive? May I have yours?
BS, I don't know if Twitter holds credit card data, but if they did, they would have needed to abide by PCI DSS rules, which requires encrypting the data in special hardware security modules.
So no, moving those servers wouldn't put the data at risk.
Tell me you don't understand how PCI works without saying you don't understand how PCI works.
Those systems can very much store PCI data and it's very much possible that those were the systems that contain information as most of the times it's on general servers.
Personally identifiable information (PII) is any set of data that has a chance to uniquely identify a person, including name, address, credit card info, social security, etc. It can also include things like birthdate, city, IP address, and so on, depending on how the combination of data works. The general rule of thumb is that you want to aggregate out to the city level at least, or completely anonymize the data. These, I’m supposing, we’re raw records that contained account info.
Isn’t all of it encrypted though? Like I understand physical access to servers is generally bad, but you’d think once the the things are unplugged it would be difficult to access the data again without bypassing encryption. I’m not a software engineer though